


Everything is a Last Ditch to Somebody

by LostInTheWilde



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Blood, Character Death, Drug Use, Klaus Hargreeves Deserves Better, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2019-12-26 18:15:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18287642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostInTheWilde/pseuds/LostInTheWilde
Summary: Having escaped Hazel and Cha-Cha with the briefcase - and the notice of his family despite being kidnapped and tortured by the kind of time-travelling assassins you wouldn't think slip under the radar -  Klaus finds himself in the Vietnam war unsure how to return home. If he even wants to.





	1. The Day That Was, Actually

**Author's Note:**

> Klaus really, really, really does deserve better. But that's not my job.

Most military generals desperate for no-man’s-land cadavers to pad their ranks didn’t muster the same enthusiasm for a clean bill of health to go with them. A goner’s a goner, right? At least give a man the dignity of dying on his feet, right? These aren’t the kind of boxes that get ticked on a conscription form, in the same unspoken way nobody would care about checking them too closely if they were. No wonder, then, that Klaus’ drug-addled body snuck into the American ranks without more than an unimportantly unconvinced up-and-down after the dust of the attack had settled. Once the wartime effort starts to settle in the chest, anything resembling ‘alive’ around a recruitment tent can have its bags packed before the sun sets over the canvas. Once the Luthers and Diegos have set sail and not come back, it falls upon the Klauses of the nation to waste themselves against a Vietnamese bayonet in their honour, or something flag something something… heroism. He learned these things within a day of his arrival having met those very same unhappy dregs, and none of it mattered to him in the least. 

His dearest papa dumped some dirt on whatever dignity the pair of them had left in a chilly mausoleum somewhere Klaus never cared to remember. Klaus’ feet hardly knew the feeling of the ground in about every way a person can disconnect themselves from the world, head to toe. Surrounded by the recently or imminently deceased is another fun night on the town streets for a man whose company is beloved by everybody else’s misery. Being a second, third, fourth (fifth on a good day, honestly) thought among his family was the natural order of things. Defying all miracle baby odds to become a footnote of history in his own era, not needing to look for disregard beyond the walls of his own cosy ‘home;’ his best extraordinary birthright, he felt. His greatest feat. Others might think his surviving every misuse of the human body amazing too, but he found it almost as regrettable as living with his waking B-movie nightmare powers. Speaking frankly, what the fuck good did he have to lose? 

Watering a warzone with his dirty blood in a time that couldn’t know him less was perfect, in his still not quite lucid mind. The more senseless his death the better. Solitary scream. Perhaps a throat wound, if only for the dramatic carotid squirt. Moments of shambling, or a helpless crawl. Pleading with the hot earth at your back and the cold sky bearing upon you for one lonely inch more. Words as gurgles and red-stained teeth, dripping slowly then far too fast on top of the slight nicotine yellow from when he still smoked tobacco as a hopeful youth. So romantic. Long gone, long days. End scene. Exeunt, Heaven or Hell, whichever would take him. A quick prayer during the credits and surely God will forgive a few class A misdemeanours in a life of excess. Maybe it’s not the biblical redemption Jesus got tetanus in a desert to afford him, but there’s a little more honour in it than finally stumbling too far into traffic with his soul coked out of his body. The devil couldn’t punish him much more in death than life, but maybe that’s exactly where all the unfortunate luck comes from. Still, don’t the pits call to queer agnostics? The mud will gape below him or a rope is going to fall from the clouds and he’s not holding his breath for either. ‘More likely nobody bothers to make the choice,’ he thinks, eyeing the dusty gun held in a hand shaking with nothing but confidence and the jolts of the bus. ‘Or just forgets. Probably. They’ll probably just forget. Leave me to holiday forever in the slightly warmer mausoleum of Asia.’ In under 24 hours, the idea had begun to grow on him. 

He seemed out of place: the unfashionable post-pubescent facial hair that everyone else in a similar boat had opted to shave before they punched their one-way tickets. The wiry frame that comes so close to filling out the uniform they’d had on hand last night. The disposition a bit more colourful than most of the men would be comfortable to share in. Yet, he fit right in: the bruised eyes tired by experience and kept open by the same, breaths apart. The pallor as the humidity washed the colour from his skin despite the sun always against it. The hair dying for a palmful and 5 minutes of conditioner. Camaraderie was palpable. From the fresh sweat washing off the stale and the malaise of second-guesses, Klaus almost found some sort of comfort here. Ghosts have left him alone, anyway. So far. Wasn't going to last long here, he knew. War is a death factory. Bodies line this forest trail, it's all a matter of time, these things.

A hand on his shoulder straightens him, hand tighter on the gun. 

"You just get in the country?" asks the man who makes dust and blood unreasonably handsome. The one from the tent, who first saw him when he appeared during the raid with that stupid fucking briefcase clutched in his arms and bombs encroaching on the soldiers too disturbed from sleep to notice the whole time travel bullshit. 

"Oh, uh... yeah." Klaus manages a shaken smile. The man grins over the stock of his gun.

"Yeah, shit's crazy, I know." 

"Yeah!" If he was more present, he would lament leaving his flirting skills 50 years in the future. 

"You got dressed," the man says, a softer tone now, as he eyes the dishevelled 'recruit' loosening up awkwardly before him. Fish further out of water than most, he figures. "I'm Dave." 

He sticks his hand out. Klaus is not sure how long he wants to commit to this era, nor how to get back to his own, but he decides he can sort that out later. It's not like he can escape this crowded bus under escort any more than he could escape a crowded camp under siege. 'It seems as if this is my new cosy home,' he thinks, meeting Dave's eyes for longer than he probably should without acknowledging his open invitation. Their hands clasp. 

"Klaus." 

They say troops are like family, don't they? Maybe this could work for a while, or until the opportunity to mess with the briefcase pushed further and further now under his seat presents itself. Getting to know this 'Dave' the world has handed to him on a tarnished platter for a few days before he takes a fantastical MIA couldn't hurt.


	2. I See Dead People, and it Sucks!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Though the jungles of war-torn Vietnam aren't exactly a paradise resort, Klaus was hoping the journey wouldn't be too bumpy. That is, of course, until - as in all warzones - someone bleeds out in his arms, but fails to die as Klaus hopes he would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the slow follow up but it turns out university doesn't care if it's first year, you WILL be burdened by work and it WILL be 30% of your grade for like, THREE different classes. Whipped this one up this afternoon and made it Extra Angsty to apologize for the wait x

To the credit of whoever it is that got the good fortune of writing your graceless story, it took longer than you’d think for the hauntings to begin, in the middle of a warzone. They gave you as much time as they could for you to breathe in, breathe out, ‘oh my God I’m in Vietnam 50 years in the past,’ breathe again, in the middle of a warzone. A chance to find your footing when the world is doing its best to blow your feet off. But it had to happen. Of course it did: you’re in the middle of a warzone. Once you get past the pretentious monologuing about Heaven and Hell and where or where not blood should be squirting, you start to notice the bodies that line the forests. Vietnamese, American. White, black, brown… whatever. All dead. Dead and watching from between the tighter clusters of tree trunks along the caravan route, or lying not quite motionless under palm leaves in maroon stained grass. Soldiers. Civilians. Nobody who actually wanted to die, probably. Depressing. You try not to look too closely at their wounds, or anything about them in general. Drawing their attention with your own is at the bottom of your list. It usually takes a while for a person to realize they’ve passed on, and trauma holds them down like a gory sheet of fly-paper. Letting them fade into your peripheries buys as much halfhearted peace of mind as it does time. If your eyes aren’t vacant enough, it pulls them out of their posthumous stupor. Better to leave them processing that moment, for you, at least. Leaving them to relive the moments of pain. Moments of fear. Moments of open bargaining. Moments of fading, slowly, knowingly. Even the impact of an instant death repeating again and again like a needle trying to find its place on a record without grooves, just flat vinyl covered in scratches. You feel a familiar, dull ache in your stomach that you haven’t known for the better part of 10 years and the worse part of drug addiction. Reacquainting with an old friend, pushed closer together by the poor rations and lack of vaccines you received before trekking into the jungle. Withdrawal isn’t doing you any favours either. You’re just sweating it all out. The pain, the paranoia, the ‘selfishness’ you refuse to accept responsibility for. Nowhere in your mother’s womb - whoever the poor bastard was - did you sign up to be a ghost counsellor. She didn’t consult you in your sale, let alone in having you at all. You suppose the world didn’t consult her on these things either, but that’s your point, isn’t it? None of this is your fault. Another ghost fades out of your thousand-yard stare as the caravan trundles farther into the rural cemetery.

  


And then Santos Araya was dying in your arms. The last to be hit in a skirmish while setting up base camp late in the evening, the bullets found a home in his femur, you assume from the amount of blood pouring from his leg and soaking into your pants as you try to drag him to safety. He moans. Tears roll down his cheeks. He squirms. You don’t know much more about him than his own name, so the others he manages to push through his teeth mean even less to you. It’s horrible. It’s disgusting. It’s really fucking sad. You’re not sure what else to do but hold him and look frantically between each barked order you’re too weighed down to assist in. Somebody is wrapping a bandage around the wounds but it doesn’t stop the haemorrhaging at all. Everyone gathering understands that it’s more of a gesture than anything, including Santos. He’s processing the moments of pain. Fear. Open bargaining. He asks if she’ll be okay and you pull his head against your chest with your hands in his hair and on his dirty, wet cheeks. 

“She’ll be fine, you’ll see.” Again, a gesture. 

He’s convulsing now. His ragged breathing picks up before it trips and falls, draining out of him like a punctured tire. Getting colder, his body slumps, but he continues to thrash breathless in your arms. Vacant eyes comb the sky. 

“Gabby… Klaus? Help me, please, I need to see her again, and my mother, she’s waiting for me, please, Leon isn’t old enough to take care of the family yet, Klaus, right? I’ve still got some fight in me, Klaus… Please…” Santos heaves like he’s coughing up blood but he doesn’t notice that nothing comes out. 

You groan, on the brink of the sobbing that the situation deserves, but more for yourself than the confused man prone in your arms. 

“Rest, Santos. Please, please… rest, please!” Your tears feel so warm on the skin of his pulseless neck and your melodramatic words colder. 'Rest, please?' What the fuck are you saying? “Don’t you deserve it? ” you choke enough back to stop from wailing and shaking the body. You realize how hysterical you seem but you can’t help yourself, can you? God, this is so shit. This is so awful. There is nothing poetic. 'Rest?' Jesus fucking Christ, Klaus.

The spirit of Santos Araya does not actually consider you or your wishes of peace. He keeps mumbling in a fever near hot enough to warm his corpse. Someone prises your arms from his torso and you groan again before scrambling backwards, clapping a bloody hand over your mouth to hold in your narcissistic misery. As if he can tell you’re tasting his blood, the ghost looks a little too far over its shoulder in your direction before twitching its head back into place. He clutches at his wounded leg, peering through himself to see another leg within it, one that lies still as he moves to cover the holes, stem the stopped-bleeding. Each of his gaping sobs is like a punch coming from inside your own ribcage. He screams and you screw your eyes shut, and begin to rock.

"Poor boy," an older sounding man says, kneeling to take something clinky, probably the dog tag, from the body. "Ian, James, Alejandro, Isaiah..." he sighs. "Too many of the young ones." 

Everybody is here now, unloaded from trucks and drawn from checking the surrounding trees for other soldiers by your scene. They're all murmuring, besides the older man, and then they too fall silent.

"Somebody get him cleaned up." You don't need to open your eyes to feel his looking you over with the same exhaustion that starts to settle into your bones. Not disapproving, but certainly not impressed by the spectacle.

A hand - unsure, then not, then quite confident - grips your shoulder. 

"Hey man, come on, you don't want to see that. Are you okay, you didn't get hit, did you?"

It's Dave. Of course, it's Dave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're having fun here. This is fun now.


	3. I've Got Ghosts, I Want Drugs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you get caught trying to weasel your unit's painkillers for a bit of craic with the lads by the blossoming love of your life, you need to improvise a good excuse, which is why you should always carry an unsheathed knife in your pants.

Santos Araya has only been familiarizing himself with the inside of a body bag for 5 hours but his melancholy spirit has still felt the need to wander the neighbourhood. You wish he wouldn’t. It’s too dark to see him clearly, but you notice him passing in and out. Sometimes there’s a sniffling in the shadows, or a confused mumbling, still coming to grips with his sad situation. Both of you are wary instead of hysterical now, but it’s still too much of a bad vibe deal for your liking. And just when Dave had calmed you down with those reassuring, strong arms of his around your blanketed shoulders… Needless to say, you want some drugs. It’s been, what, 3 days? You miss weed. Ecstasy. Steered clear of meth. Enjoyed dabbling in coke, here and there. You’ve started eyeing the fungi lining the jungle paths. You’re not stupid enough to try any… for the moment. Feeling like one of those ‘play it by ear’ things, maybe. You see Santos again - and some delightful looking strangers missing various anatomies apparating behind him - and figure at this point you’ll do a set of cheap vodka tampons or lick dirt to get rid of them all. 

Though a talent that sees regrettably little limelight, you’re actually a decent thief when you’re (also regrettably) sober. Pogo didn’t buy your routine for a second when you took that pearl box from Reginald’s study, but you’ve never been able to pull the wool over those tired, genetically modified eyes. Otherwise, you lie as a sailor swears. You take things you probably shouldn’t as a chef always tastes the food one time too many. In a way, it helps that nobody takes you seriously. People underestimate you if they think you’re some harmless, ditzy bimbo, which isn’t entirely wrong but why give them a reason to think any different when you’ve got a good thing going? Nobody’s expecting you to steal the painkillers, nor get away with it. You know exactly where the medical supplies are after the earlier incident too. They’re all unguarded and waiting for your slightly unsteady fingers to pilfer the treasure. It will be the most amazingly average crime! 

“I’m not surprised, but I still have to ask if this is what we’re doing now.” 

Ben startles you, as he has been so wont to do for so many years. He’s long since lost any real edge to the judgement in his arched brow, his jaded eyes, but you can tell he doesn’t feel too hot about depriving the soldiers of their painkillers so you can get a fix. It’s all not so beyond you to agree with him. You’re debaucherous, not depraved. Still… 

“Yes. Yes it is what we’re doing, thank you, dearest brother” you whisper behind your hand, hoping to disguise the conversation as a cough if anybody walks too close. “Never been a Good Samaritan, so why start now? ‘Are you okay, Klaus? I’m so sorry you got teleported to Hell, Vietnam, to face your worst traumas as a human person thoroughly died all over you and threatens to haunt you forever before the body's cold, Klaus. It’s so sad Klaus, take a load off! Surely there are some amphetamines to spare!’” 

"Pretty sure I didn't say that."

"Quite, quite... Maybe it would be best if you said nothing at all, in fact."

It’s late enough that people aren’t going to waste the energy questioning the village weirdo talking to himself on the way to the medkits. Those still awake are using what they’ve got left to drink quietly, recoup the somber mood. None of them would blame you, you feel, if you wanted a little itsy bitsy hit after ushering a man into his even more unfortunate next life. Blood still marks your skin where you couldn’t muster to rub the rag hard enough. Nobody is safe from your grave disappointments. You giggle at the amateur-hour pun. There’s better material deep inside, you know it. But simple things, simple people, you suppose. 

“Yoo-hoo,” Ben says, snapping his fingers. He can’t read your mind, thank Jesus H. Christ, but he’s spent far too much time around you to not know when it goes walkies. “Theft in progress.”

“Benjamin, I do everything best just a little out of focus,” you chide.

“The last time you did something a little out of focus, you got kidnapped by time-travelling assassins.” He goes to push your shoulder, but his hand passes through. 

“I think you’re overestimating how much I value your input in criminal matters, child superhero.” You go to brush his hand off because you forget it’s not there. Even now there are always moments when you expect to feel him. 

“Could’ve been an adult superhero if I wasn’t dead,” he says as much to his fingernails as to you. 

You stop to wave your hands through his torso like you’re trying to dispel a particularly bad fart you wish was a lot more silent. 

“Yes, Ben, it’s very tragic that dying young and being dead are your gimmicks, but could you try any harder to make yourself a one-dimensional character here?” 

“Sorry to inconvenience you with my sob story, dude,” he laughs, a wry sound stumbling into a sigh as he gestures over his shoulder. “Someone’s coming, you might want an excuse to be skulking around the cargo besides ‘slightly unhinged.’” 

“Do you think temporally displaced would cut it?” you ask, pulling a knife from your pants.

“I think the first step is to stop talking to me.” 

He disappears under the watch of your indignant side-eye, leaving you to cut your hand open with a restrained wince, a gouge through the Hello. Giving you just enough time to tuck the knife back into your waistband, Dave, oh Dave, appears behind you. You shake your hand to speed up the bleeding. Noticing the droplets that begin to fly off it, he stills your hand in the air and pulls it to his face. His eyes widen as he notices a depth to the wound that surprises even you. 

“Klaus, how did you do this?” He gingerly releases the hand and you draw it to your chest, cradled in your other arm. “That’s real nasty to leave open in a jungle.” 

You laugh like a little schoolgirl as he pulls you the rest of the way to the medkits by the crook of your arm and sits you on a crate while he rummages for gauze. 

“Oh, you know the old story: you trip, you fall, you slice your palm open with a combat knife, nothing fancy.” Your dismissive gesturing throws a few drops of blood across his chest as he turns back to you with alcohol and bandages. 

“I’m not going to say this won’t hurt because I’m not much for lying, but it’s good for you. Promise.” The tenderness in his voice tickles your intestines in all the right places and you surrender your hand almost too fast, trying _not_ to not meet his eyes, but also not to look too closely, you know?

“I know my way around an injury or two,” you grimace as the alcohol washes over the cut, wrapped firmly with the kind of delicateness you’ve not come to expect from a man of Dave’s physical dispositions. 

“Let’s keep it to one.” He smiles, pulling the knife from your waistband and wiping it off on his trousers. “Don’t want you getting hurt more than you need to be.” 

Despite whatever’s left upstairs to pass as your ‘good sense’ during business hours doing its 'best' to push you back, you lean forward and pull Dave into your arms. Hesitantly, he wraps his own around you with a little squeeze that threatens to force the air from your lungs harder than any punch, kick, or fall you’ve ever known. 

“Thank you, Dave.” His breath warms your ear.

“Not a problem.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not new here but it's been so long that I might as well be.


End file.
